LED bulbs and X-10

[Ed Pawlowski]

I've been changing out bulbs and going to the LED lights. I really like them and have swapped out 9 of them so far.

Yesterday though, I ran into a different situation. The outdoor light over my family room sliding door is controlled by and X-10 switch. I've done that for years and it is very handy as this is the most used door in the house.

The light was "off" and I screwed the bulb in, and it lit partially. Not full brightness, but just dull. When the timer came on, it went to full brightness. Having it half on 24 hours takes away some of the savings, but I guess it is still minimal security at night after the normal off time. I also know not to replace the other X10 lights with LED. They work fine with CFL.

[mike]

I had the same problem with X10 dimmers and outdoor motion detector lights. With CFL, I had to switch to X10 appliance modules with relays. There's a resistor that puts current thru the lamp to allow you to use the lamp switch to turn it on/off. That resistor charged up the cap and the CFL flashed every few seconds. Removing the resistor fixed that.

Non-dimmable LED's had much the same issues as CFL. But the newer dimmable LED's work in the outside motion detectors and SOME of the X10 lamp modules. I still have one X10 wall-switch-dimmer that behaves exactly like yours. I put an incandescent back in it and will wait to see what the next generation leds do. If I used it much, I'd bite the bullet and swap to a wall switch X10 module.

[Tony Hwang]

Hi, That's odd, CFL gave me trouble like that, Philips dimmable LED has no trouble.

[Mike Hartigan]

The local control 'feature' turned out to be a blessing in my case. I bought some dimmable LED strip for under the kitchen cabinets, planning to control them with an X10 lamp module, dimming them at night. They flickered badly and generally misbehaved, so I tried an appliance module. Turns out, the small current that is bled through results in the perfect light level for the night light! It doesn't take much to light up an LED.

FYI, the "half on 24 hours" that you're now observing was there all along. It's not sufficient to light up a conventional lamp, so you just never noticed it. Rest assured, it was still consuming watts :(